The French go even farther by eating thick fresh cream with Chevretons du Beaujolais and Fromage Blanc in the style that adds a la creme to their already glorified names.

The English came along with Snow Cream Cheese that is more of a dessert, similar to Italian Cream Cheese.

We’d like to have a cheese ice cream to contrast with too sweet ones.  Attempts at this have been made, both here and in England; Scottish Caledonian cream came closest.  We have frozen cheese with fruit, to be sure, but no true cheese ice cream as yet, though some cream cheeses seem especially suitable.

    The farmer’s daughter hath soft brown hair
    (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese)
    And I met with a ballad I can’t say where,
    That wholly consisted of lines like these,
    (Butter and eggs and a pound of cheese.)

In this parody by Calverly, “The Farmer’s Daughter,” the ingredients suggest cheese cake, dating back to 1381 In England.  From that year Kettner in his Book of the Table quotes this recipe: 

Take cream of almonds or of cow milk and beat them well together; and make small coffins (that is, cases of pastry), and do it (put it) therein; and do (put) thereto sugar and good powders.  Or take good fat cheese and eggs and make them of divers colours, green, red or yellow, and bake them or serve them forth.

This primitive “receipt” grew up into Richmond maids of honor that caused Kettner to wax poetic with: 

At Richmond we are permitted to touch with our lips a countless number of these maids—­light and airy as the “airy, fairy Lilian.”  What more can the finest poetry achieve in quickening the things of earth into tokens and foretastes of heaven, with glimpses of higher life and ethereal worlds.

CHEESECAKES

Coronation Cheese Cake

The Oxford Dictionary defines cheese cake as a “tartlet filled with sweet curds, etc.”  This shows that the cheese is the main thing, and the and-so-forth just a matter of taste.  We are delighted to record that the Lord Mayor of London picked traditional cheese tarts, the maids of honor mentioned earlier in this section, as the Coronation dessert with which to regale the second Queen Elizabeth at the city luncheon in Guildhall This is most fitting, since these tarts were named after the maids of honor at the court of the first Queen Elizabeth.  The original recipe is said to have sold for a thousand pounds.  These Richmond maids of honor had the usual cheese cake ingredients:  butter and eggs and pounds of cheese, but what made the subtle flavor:  nutmeg, brandy, lemon, orange-flower water, or all four?

More than 2,000 years before this land of Coronation cheese cake, the Greeks had a word for it—­several in fact:  Apician Cheese Cake, Aristoxenean, and Philoxenean among them.  Then the Romans took it over and we read from an epistle of the period: